84
points
rozenmd
Joined 3,906 karma
Hey, I'm Max.
I started OnlineOrNot in early 2021: https://onlineornot.com
There's no massive team, no investors looking for growth at any cost, just me, running a self-funded, sustainable business from France.
Open invitation to talk shop: you can always reach me at max@onlineornot.com
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I also blog about running a SaaS: https://maxrozen.com
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I'm a Software Engineer originally from Sydney, Australia with a passion for the Internet.
I've worked at Atlassian and am now at Cloudflare, building the Workers platform.
- rozenmdI had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.
- I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.
- I run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
- Interestingly it stayed up if you weren't logged in.
- Last year I predicted: People will continue to run websites, and need to know when they're down (god, I hope).
My 2026 prediction is that people will continue running websites and buiding web apps that need monitoring, more than ever before.
- OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com)
Planning on wrapping up the year with a year in review post (thankfully I've been writing monthly updates as I go, should save some time).
Apart from that, clearing up tech debt that helped me ship fast, but was ultimately a bad fit for the business (Next.js and GraphQL).
- how many months ago? the RRP on that today is like 1k+: https://www.ldlc.com/en/product/PB00622951.html
- Learn by doing, I used iFixit to replace my Pixel 3 screen/body, Pixel 6a screen, and a bunch of other mac fixes. You just get better from doing it.
- legal entities cost millions to set up for big companies
many companies are afraid of the employment laws they don't fully understand
timezones/cultural differences
There are still contracts for working remotely at companies like this, but you've gotta be known for solving painful problems that they can't fix themselves
- pattern matching. if you stray too far from the group, procurement folks get jittery about needing to explain it to their company.
- The money in SaaS has never been folks willing/able to build it themselves
risk-tolerant early adopters care purely about your features, and are willing to figure out the rest
the bigger orgs (folks that refuse to move off legacy software) won't move until you can answer questionnaires about industry-specific integrations, security/compliance, enterprise-level support/SLAs, training/onboarding, change management, scalability/performance, data governance and management tools
- guess that explains the random spike in people searching downdetector in OnlineOrNot: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=RlByu...
- I use it for realistic(ish) testing of my hono API, big fan
- There's an active incident: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/s35102g9syk0
- Thinkpad T480, get an old enterprise machine off ebay and add more RAM
I did this a while ago, wrote about it here: https://maxrozen.com/getting-your-own-good-enough-laptop-for...
- Better question to ask might be: do you actively avoid medium.com links?
I know I do.
- 260 points
- 3 points